Quotes About Reflection

The ways we miss our lives are life.

When I was young and miserable and pretty And poor, I'd wish What all girls wish: to have a husband, A house and children. Now that I'm old, my wish Is womanish: That the boy putting groceries in my car See me.

Acceptance of ones' mortality is a process, not an epiphany.

Trouble is, George Washington is not my ancestor, private or public. He owned my ancestors, abused them as chattel and willed them to his wife, Martha, upon his death. I and mine need to know about George and Martha but, assuredly, we do not need to revere them. Indeed, psychically we cannot afford to revere them.

At long last, let America contemplate the scope of its enduring human-rights wrong against the whole of a people. Let the vision of blacks not become so blighted from a sunless eternity that we fail to see the staggering breadth of America's crime against us.

For the rest of us, the price of our inability to place ourselves in the fullness of world history has been crippling.

We, like others, need to define ourselves, to place our lives in a long-term linear intergenerational context. We, like others, need to celebrate ourselves by seeing ourselves celebrated. We, like others, need to stare at objects that can help us discover reflections of ourselves in an idealized past. That's really what it's all about, isn't it? Remembering. The human's innate need to remember one's self before one's own time.

What then was I doing visiting George Washington's Mount Vernon many years ago with Hazel? Confused? Confessedly. How can any American who isn't white not be?

Behind him, the lights of Erie appeared to be underwater now, a twinkling city sinking into an indigo sea.

useful knowledge was to be acquired only by doing, by living, by running headlong into the burning house of human experience and coming out singed and scorched, lungs full of smoke. Such knowledge would arise not during but after the experience, when you are sitting alone in the dark and re-creating everything you did and felt and assessing the wisdom or foolishness of each moment, the penalties and rewards.

recognize their own vituperous thought shaming.

Maybe the gift of any great person is the power to converse with our own hearts.

The ghosts of my heart strolled in.

Even a light-colored shirt or blouse or clown makeup can cause a reflection on the monitor, obscuring some of the data displayed.

First think, and if thy thoughts approve thy will, Then speak, and after, what thou speak?st fulfil.

Reprove not in their wrath incens?d men, Good counsel comes clean out of season then; But when his fury is appeased and past, He will conceive his fault and mend at last: When he is cool and calm, then utter it; No man gives physic in the midst o? th? fit.

I am 25 today—it is terrible to think how little time remains!

I admit I did say so and I admit that it was a very stupid thing to have said. I said a lot of stupid things when I was in the Conservative Party, and I left them because I did not want to go on saying stupid things.

The separation of lovers delights the heart of the biographer.

No matter what we have come through, or how many perils we have safely passed, or how many imperfect and jagged - in some places perhaps irreparably - our life has been, we cannot in our heart of hearts imagine how it could have been different. As we look back on it, it slips in behind us in orderly array, and, with all its mistakes, acquires a sort of eternal fitness, and even, at times, of poetic glamour.

I find that there is no speech that is not soliloquy. And yet, always, I sense an audience.

If we were to gain God's perspective, even for a moment, and were to look at the way we go through life accumulating and hoarding and displaying our things, we would have the same feelings of horror and pity that any sane person has when he views people in an asylum endlessly beating their heads against the wall.

I listened to it last night for the first time since we started this project. I went out to my car and put it in and went to an empty parking lot and just listened and read the little pamphlet that came with it. After two or three songs I burst into tears.

Successful people are not afraid to ask themselves tough questions and then go deep to get the answers. Unsuccessful people avoid the tough questions, and if they come across one, either they won't answer it or they avoid it. Of course, it's not enough to pose good questions, which is why successful people are also good listeners. Most people tend to be so busy formulating their next statement that they hear very little of what is said to them.